[A. E. Stallings]

This interesting discussion started by Kevin got a bit sidetracked. I'm trying to refocus it here.

Roger Slater had said:

Alicia, I was thinking of Larkin myself when I saw the topic. In Christopher Ricks' book on Bob Dylan, he digresses into a discussion of Philip Larkin's "Love Songs In Age," and most of the discussion has to do with the fact that each stanza enjambs into the next, and the final line of the poem is the only sentence whose ending corresponds with a stanza ending. I'm too lazy to type out Ricks' entire discussion, but here's part of it:
quote:
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"The point of ruinning one stanza into the next is more than to create pregnant pauses, more even than to imitate the musical interweaving of love songs. It is to create the austere finality of the conclusion. Only once in this poem does a full stop coincide with the end of a line or with the end of a stanza. This establishes the fullness of the stop, the assurance that Larkin has concluded his poem and not just run out of things to say. The same authoratative finality is alive in the rhyme scheme. Larkin's pattern (abacbdcdd) allows of a clinching couplet only at the end of a stanza. He then prevents any such clinching at the end of the first two stanzas by having very strong enjambm ent, spilling across the line-endings. The result is that the very last couplet is the first in the poem to release what we have been waiting for, the decisive authority of a couplet, rhyme sealing rhyme in final settlement."
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It's also worth noting that Larkin believed in reading poems off the page, and not in hearing them recited, and so the stanza enjambment for him was a visual way of controlling the flow as well as an auditory way.
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Emily Dickinson was another poet to come up in the discussion. This one fits the topic particularly nicely:

I like to see it lap the Miles--
And lick the Valleys up--
And stop to feed itself at Tanks--
And then - prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains--
And supercilious peer
In Shanties - by the sides of Roads--
And then a Quarry pare

To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid - hooting stanza--
Then chase itself down Hill--

And neigh like Boanerges--
Then - punctual as a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door--


There is that wonderful enjambment across stanzas as the train steps around a pile of mountains. Indeed, there is enjambment to greater or lesser degree (perhaps not so much in the last instance) across all the stanzas, which again suits the linked-up nature of a train, I think--the poem is one sentence chasing itself downhill. And her curious mention of the train complaining in horrid, hooting stanza. I have wondered about that, whether she is simply comparing its sound to a song, or whether she is using stanza in some more literal way, the cars of the train, for instance, as separate rooms. Like the Larkin poem Roger mention's, this poem too only really "stops" at the very end, literally at its own stable door. Wonderful!

[Justin Sider]

At the end of his Nobel Acceptance Speech, Seamus Heaney returns to Yeats' "The Stare's Nest by My Window":

"Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body...The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all about..."

I think this dovetails very nicely with the Larkin and Dickinson example. A line or stanza break does not necessarily cordon off ideas so much as it serves as a vehicle for the reader's understanding of the piece. "In lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself" (Heaney). In aspiring towards their subjects, both Larkin and Dickinson sought the success of this belief, where the structure provides the reader with both an aural grounding and a jumping-off point. In either case, to simply confine stanzas to premises of a poetic syllogism or to ignore matters of sense entirely in stanza breaks is to lose sight of "the ring of truth" to which form is so integral in poetry.

[Tom Jardine]

One of the tests I do to check a poem is to remove all the stanza breaks, line breaks, etc, and see what is left. I see breaks and forms as helpers, guides, notes, not as the poem itself. Many a cake fails without heaping on the icing. When writing a poem, remove all the devices and see if it is still interesting. Try it. This gets done anyway, often in reviews when a poem is quoted without the form to save page space.

Here is the ED. To me, it brings out the excellence and interest and without the stumbling caps. I think what I am trying to say is that without any structure it still works, as any poem should.

A narrow fellow in the grass occasionally rides; You may have met him,--did you not, his notice sudden is. The grass divides as with a comb, a spotted shaft is seen; and then it closes at your feet and opens further on. He likes a boggy acre, a floor too cool for corn. Yet when a child, and barefoot, I more than once at morn, have passed, I thought, a whip-lash unbraiding in the sun,-- when, stooping to secure it, it wrinkled, and was gone. Several of nature's people I know, and they know me; I feel for them a transport of cordiality; but never met this fellow, attended or alone, without a tighter breathing, and zero at the bone.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Funny you should call them "stumbling caps." I think of the initial capitals more as steps ascending a grand staircase. After the end of the line before, and the emphasis given its last word by the rime, you have a new word stressed with the cap, signalling the reader to lift it up a bit. When lower cased, it's like running down a regular flight of stairs.

I suppose with that metaphor, the stanza breaks are like landings in between the steps. There's usually nothing there but space, to either pause for or leap over, depending on what the sentence and sense is doing, but occassionally, there's a peculiar ornament on the landing, as in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner . Here a swatch from section III:

At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship ; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail ;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood !
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail ! a sail !

A flash of joy ;

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call :
Gramercy ! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.

And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide ?

See ! see ! (I cried) she tacks no more !
Hither to work us weal ;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel !

The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done !
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun ;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace !)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.

And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.

Alas ! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears !
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres ?

The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton ship.

And those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate ?
And is that Woman all her crew ?
Is that a DEATH ? and are there two ?
Is DEATH that woman's mate ?

Like vessel, like crew !

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold :
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice ;
`The game is done ! I've won ! I've won !'
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

Or, with the room and corridor metaphor, Coleridge's Victorian stanza headings or side notes (depending on how the book is typeset), are like paintings hung in the hallway.

The interesting thing here is that the placement of these accomplishes the same thing as a novelist does with the placement of speaking verbs and inter-dialogue action: It controls the space of the pause between speeches.

For example, take the four following examples:

"Your book? Oh, it's here somewhere." She glanced around the room.

"Your book?" She glanced around the room. "Oh, it's here somewhere."

"Your book? Oh," she said, glancing around the room, "it's here somewhere."

"Your book?" she said. "Oh," She glanced around the room, "it's here somewhere."

Basically, the brain reads the dialogue in a string. When there's a pause for exposition, the brain times the pause of the character speaking to the interval that it take the reader to read the exposition.

With narrative verse, Coleridge is doing the same thing with his headers, timing the interval of the dramatic pause to create either startlement with the short clipped four-monosyllabic-word headers, or else suspense and dramatic tension with the longer descriptions.

The varying length of the stanzas and the grouping of differing numbers of stanzas under headers also lends to this effect, as well as helping in some ways to mimick the feeling of a sea voyage.

[Deborah Warren]

I'm quite partial to run-on stanzas. They build up a head of steam, uninterrupted. Better yet, they can play down the stanza pattern and make it somewhat subliminal. A ballad may want to shine the spotlight on it, but often it's more effective if subtle.

[Janet Kenny]

I too have come to enjoy run-on stanzas but I do find the simultaneous retaining of capitalised lines is a contradiction in forms. A strange retention of an illogical historical habit. If punctuation is to be an expressive aid (I share Larkin's approach) then the caps destroy that expressive signal. Larkin himself used caps, which is confusing.
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited March 18, 2005).]